Just bought this cookbook called The Food Lab by J. Kenji Lopez-Alt. It was expensive at $35.00 on Amazon, but I had heard good things about it on Reddit and elsewhere. I am really enjoying it and highly recommend it. Think about it as a gift to someone on your list who is a burgeoning cook.
Anyway I just read this section called “Boom Goes the Blender” and it brought back not-so-fond memories, so I thought I would share it with you.
Kenji writes:
Here’s a scenario that happened to me just last week: I was making a batch of tomato soup for my wife (who can’t get enough of the stuff), and I’d just dumped the hot tomato mixture into the blender. As I reach for the On button, a tiny voice in the back of my mind said to me, All of this has happened before, and all of it will happened again. Ask yourself this question: “Would an Idiot do this?” If the answer is “yes” then do not do this thing. Of course, I went ahead and turned on the blender anyway. The top popped off in a violent explosion, and by dog leaped behind the couch in fear as hot tomatoes splattered across the apartment with all the fury of a VEI-7 volcanic eruption. This kind of stuff happens because there are some mistakes I never learn from and, more important, because of thermodynamics and the physics of vapor formation.
He goes on to explain why this occurs, which I will skip. (This guy is an MIT grad and a master cook so he loves to explain stuff and I love to read it, but you may not.)
I decided to make Prime Rib Au Jus for Thanksgiving one year. The recipe called for placing the boiling hot au jus in the blender, never cautioning you to be careful, it might explode (Thanks Ming Tsai!) So right in the midst of preparation for Thanksgiving dinner, everything was ready to go and I had a blender explosion; hot au jus all over our white plaster walls. Laura freaked out. I had to send her over to the neighbor’s with instructions for them to liberally pour her drinks while I attempted to clean up. It took a while. I had to literally sand down the walls to remove the stains.
Suffice to say, I did learn my lesson and will never do this again unlike Kenji. Word to the wise: never put hot liquid in the blender….
